Shawn Hewitt's blog

I've always thought that the area of U.S. obsolete notes remains the wild west of paper money; there is much in the field that has yet to be discovered and mapped. But there are a great many references that have been created over the last century that collectors of state notes can use to help build their collections. Many works have been sponsored by the SPMC over the last 50 years. Here is a partial list of titles -- I am sure there are others still missing in my library:

About a year ago, I concluded my blog series on Large Size Replacement Nationals. Since then, I've given a presentation and printed an 8-page handout for Memphis 2013. The presentation (it can be downloaded here: https://www.spmc.org/member-presentations) was well received and was the best attended seminar at the convention. An article is forthcoming in Bank Note Reporter.

We'll finish our blog series with the diagnostics published in "Identification of Series of 1882 and 1902 National Bank Replacement Notes Printed in the 1903-1915 Period" by R. Shawn Hewitt and Peter Huntoon. SPMC members can read the article here.

Diagnostics

National bank notes meeting the following criteria are replacement notes printed after the general conversion to new style fonts (circa September 1903):

Once I discovered a replacement 1902 Plain Back, I realized that there should exist replacement 1882 Value Backs of the same style. An earlier look through the NBN Census (www.nbncensus.com) revealed exactly zero hits, but I did get lucky while searching through the Heritage archives (www.ha.com). There I found two replacements.

In our article, Peter Huntoon and I call 1915 the end of the era when old style font presses were used to make up replacement sheets of nationals. At the time it was written, we had not found a single Plain Back replacement. That has changed, but the picture is somewhat fuzzy.

Series 1882 Date Back replacements are very scarce. Of the 1700 or so listed in the Heritage Archives (which has some duplication) and the 1100 imaged notes in the NBN Census (which includes a certain amount of overlap with the Heritage archives), I have been able to locate only four replacement notes. Here are the statistics for this type:

I would have to say that Date Backs (both 1882 and 1902) are my favorite types of large size replacement nationals. That’s because as replacements they’re scarcer than most other types, yet they’re less expensively priced compared to other types when they come up for sale. Further, there is no ambiguity about when you find one with the old style font. Recall that for Red Seals and Brown Backs, the earliest of those used the old style serial number fonts, and you need to do a little homework to determine the date of printing. By contrast, any Date Ba